A few quotes, but as we like to say, read the whole thing.

The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice or Firefox.

[..]

The iPhone’s outside apps act much more as if they’re in the cloud than on your phone: Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products.

[..]

When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.

On a related note, this post seems like an appropriate occasion to link to this great cartoon, which the artist created over 10 months ago.

Back when the story broke, most media outlets ran with the claims made in the original press release or even took it to a next step by suggesting a causal relationship between Facebook use and lower grades. Only a few outlets took care in reporting, among them the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the last few days, the BBC has had a piece considering the various perspectives.

By the way, this is the quickest turn-around I’ve ever experienced with an academic publication. Below the fold is a bit more describing how it came about.

On Sunday, April 16th I went to bed realizing that a story would likely spread like crazy the next day as it claimed a negative relationship between Facebook use and academic achievement. I looked up what I could about it and was concerned as it didn’t seem like the study offered solid evidence of the claims, but it was precisely the time of piece the media love.

By the time I woke up on Monday, April 17th, people among my Facebook contacts had started posting the story.

At 7:55am ET I tweeted the following:
Based on my UIC data set (representative sample of 1K+): no correlation b/w any Facebook use or # of hrs of SNS use & students’ grades, fyi.

Siva Vaidhyanathan responded soon after (at 8:18am to be precise) with this tweet:
@eszter will you blog prelim results of sns/grade correlation?

I would have preferred not to, mainly because it was the first day in a long time that I had a full day for my own work. But throughout the day, an increasing number of media outlets (first in the UK then in the US and elsewhere) picked up the story. Following all that media coverage were people’s tweets plus blog and Facebook posts about the study.

I decided I should blog about it after all and posted an entry here a few hours later. There is only so much you can say in 140 characters allowed on Twitter, after all, and I decided this was worth more elaboration.

Soon after, my blog post was automatically reposted on my Facebook Wall. My contacts started commenting on it including Josh Pasek who noted that his data also did not suggest the purported relationship between Facebook use and grades (see Facebook snippet above).

Twenty minutes after posting on my Facebook Wall, Josh sent me an email asking whether I was interested in “working on a report” about all this. I said I’d be up for working on something more formal.

Josh brought on eian more from the University of Pennsylvania, we had a conference call a few hours later and Josh started writing the first draft of the paper. Dozens of emails and about ten drafts later, we sent the paper off for consideration and peer-review to First Monday. A few days later it was accepted and a few days after that, it was published.

Many thanks go to the editor of First Monday, Ed Valauskas, and the reviewers for recognizing that a quick turnaround here would be helpful.

Regarding the image above, note that Josh’s comment is the authentic one with the original time stamp while eian’s is one we added later for the illustration.

UPDATE (4/29/09): The video of the session is now available here.

Reading the press coverage about this recent study from a researcher at Ohio State and one at Ohio Dominican University, it’s difficult to get enough information to offer a careful critique. All we’re told is that the findings concern “219 U.S. undergraduates and graduates“, but no idea as to how they were sampled or how the survey was administered. Additionally, there is no detail given in these articles as to how either Facebook use or grades were measured. Is this good and responsible reporting? Hardly.

Doing a search on the AERA’s annual meeting Web site for study author Aryn Karpinski brings up the abstract of the paper “A Description of Facebook Use and Academic Performance Among Undergraduate and Graduate Students”. It’s reasonable to assume that this is the study upon which the press coverage is based as the articles mention AERA. The abstract for a poster to be presented this Thursday reveals a bit more information about the study than the press coverage: a survey was administered to 71 undergraduate and 43 graduate students. It’s not clear how that adds up to 219 respondents as per the press coverage. Perhaps this is the wrong abstract, but I don’t see anything else that would fit the description better. Perhaps the study has been updated since the abstract was initially submitted. Nonetheless, this doesn’t help with transparency about the project.

The abstract suggests that the study is comparing the GPA of users vs non-users without regard to amount of time spent online. Comments by Karpinski in the press coverage, however, suggest measures of amount of time spent on the site: “Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying.” Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time a researcher gets misquoted in the press so not clear if the researcher really said this (or perhaps the abstract doesn’t include everything that’s covered in the piece). Alternatively, “more time” here is simply meant to refer to “any time at all”, not exactly how I’d talk about having “any use” data, but I guess technically any use is more than no use. Point being, we’re not any closer to understanding the study’s scope and the extent to which we should put much faith in its findings.

Having done related work, I didn’t recall any such relationship between Facebook use and grades so I went back to my data set this morning to check. Indeed, based on data about 1,060 first-year students at the University of Illinois, Chicago collected on a paper-pencil survey in Winter, 2007 (data set described in detail here), I find no relationship between whether someone uses Facebook and self-reported GPA (collected in categories, not in specific grade-point average terms). Additionally, I also have data on number of times the respondent used a social networking site the day before taking the survey and there is no correlation between that measure and grades either.

It is also worth noting that an important finding of my study was how Facebook use is not randomly distributed among participants (e.g., parental education, race, ethnicity predicted adoption) so it’s helpful to look at the relationship of various factors such as grades (or whatever else) to Facebook usage while controlling for other variables.

There are lots of reasons why one may or may not find a relationship between Facebook use and grades. I won’t get into that here, it could make for a very long essay. The point of this post is mainly to suggest a careful approach to what we see in the press and at conferences.

A caveat: I woke up this morning with a million immediate things to do and happy that I’d finally get to do them. Then I realized this story had kept spreading since last night and some people asked me to blog about it. I may have missed some relevant resources in my search for background material and others may show up after I post this. Feel free to post updates below with relevant information.

EFFector Vol 22, No. 09 April 1, 2009 editor@eff.org

A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
ISSN 1062-9424

In the 1,000,000th EFFector:
* New Look for EFFector!
* Congress Passes “Mickey’s Law”
* FBI Announces Operation Liar Liar Pants Oon Fire
* NSAdvice: Kinder, Gentler NSA Hires Advice Columnists to
Assist Spied-On Americans
* AP Sues Artist for Being Unable to Draw From Memory
* Google Offers Free, Ad-Supported Kitchen Appliances
* Amazon Gives in to Author’s Guild — Again
* EFF Offers Award for Large Composite Numbers
* PM Brown Announces the Permanent High Office of Hacking
and Tinkering in the Chancellory of the Exchequer
* minilinks
* Changes to EFF’s Privacy Policy
* Administrivia and EULA

For more information on EFF activities & alerts:

http://www.eff.org/

Make a donation and become an EFF member today!

http://eff.org/support/

Tell a friend about EFF:

http://action.eff.org/site/Ecard?ecard_id=1061

effector: n, Computer Sci. A pretentious word you should
never use in conversation.

: . : . : . : . : . : . : . : . : . : . : . : . : . : . :

* New Look for EFFector!

As part of our policy to keep on the “frontier” of exciting
new Internet developments, starting next week we’ll be
sending a special “effktr” edition to all subscribers from
whose personal information we can derive their Twitter
accounts and/or cellphone numbers. Effktr has all the news
and analysis you expect from EFFector, but with most of the
vowels taken out and the remaining text compressed to 140
characters or less. To give you an idea of what to expect,
here’s what our “beta” effktr readers received last week:

OMG EFF GREP FBI, TSA, NSL! NIX TOR JAIL +! NIX CELL LOG
GANK! CNET AX SGHN! AXL N /- WTF? WRNR DMCA KIDS LOL! NO
MIL CYBER! ATT GET ACTA!

Our new service is opt-out: if you’d like to not receive
our new format, please email “tl;dr” to april1@eff.org by
the end of today.

For this complete post:

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

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* Congress Passes “Mickey’s Law”

It was the story that stirred a nation: one mouse,
kidnapped from his corporate family and ruthlessly
exploited by infringers, pirates, and decorative birthday
cake designers.

But after an unprecedented campaign by concerned
rightsholders across the nation, Mickey’s experience has a
happy ending of sorts: “Mickey’s Law,” a new bill that will
make children’s media safe from our most despicable
elements in society.

The law will protect innocent cartoon characters by
creating a national registry of “copyright offenders” to be
run jointly by the RIAA and MPAA. Anyone accused of
repeatedly downloading copyrighted files without permission
will be required to register themselves immediately and
notify the registry within 2 weeks each time they move IP
addresses. The law also bars them from residing in any
domicile located within 1000 feet of an open wifi
connection.

Mickey’s Law was passed with bi-partisan support. Harry
Reid, Senate leader, introduced the bill with a moving
description of its intent: “We’re not just doing this for
Mickey. We’re doing it for the children. No, wait, we’re
doing it *to* the children, as a result of enforcing the
children’s contractually limited rights to their purchased
media.”

For this complete post:

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

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* FBI Announces Operation Liar Liar Pants on Fire
Targeting Myspace Terms of Service Violators

Washington, D.C. – The Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) today announced action against untold numbers of
Americans who have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act by providing false information to ySpace, Facebook,
Match.com and other Web 2.0 companies. These companies
require users to click through an agreement obligating them
to provide accurate, current and complete information when
registering and using the services. Earlier this year, the
Department of Justice successfully prosecuted Missouri
resident Lori Drew in federal court in Los Angeles for
unauthorized access to MySpace for providing false
information. In the aftermath of that conviction, the FBI
learned that hundreds, or thousands, or potentially
hundreds of thousands, are defrauding social networks and
ripping the social fabric by lying about themselves online.

The ongoing initiative, known as Operation Liar Liar Pants
on Fire, “reflects the FBI’s mission and effort to
identify, target, disrupt and dismantle criminal fraud
schemes that target our nation’s social networks,” said
Assistant Director Prudence Macgillicutty, FBI Criminal
Investigative Division.

From its inception until today, Operation Liar Liar has
successfully apprehended many offenders who have provided
false information in violation of terms of service. One
recent success put a 145 lb woman behind bars aftershe told
a potential suitor on Match.com that she only weighed 135.
Facebook user Joe Malone was sentenced to 16 months in
prison for fraudulently sending a chat message stating that
he could not attend a film date because he had to wash his
hair that evening. Subsequent investigation revealed the
truth — he “just wasn’t that into” his
“friend.” Operation
Liar Liar also uncovered the latest chilling trend among
youth — unauthorized access to the Google search engine,
which prohibits users under the age of legal consent. Even
the Obama administration has not escaped the fair
administration of justice. It turns out that Facebook’s
“Barack Obama” was actually a junior aide in the White
House Communications Department.

For this complete press release:

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

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* NSAdvice: Kinder, Gentler NSA Hires Advice Columnists to
Assist Spied-On Americans

Under the Obama Administration, the NSA hopes to soften its
image and improve public opinion concerning its warrantless
dragnet spying program–with a little help from Ann
Landers. The NSA has contracted with Landers and dozens of
other personal advice columnists, many of whom have been
laid off from their newspaper jobs as that media sector
continues to lag, to help provide advice to the millions of
ordinary Americans whose communications are continually
being intercepted by the secretive agency.

“Many Americans don’t realize that the NSA is only
intercepting all of their phone calls, faxes, emails, IMs,
SMS messages, and web traffic in order to *protect* them,
and we hope that the new ‘NSAdvice’ program will help
educate the people about our protective mission,” said NSA
Director Keith B. Alexander. “As our supercomputers sift
through all of your private communications for hints of a
terror plot, they can also spot when you’re going through a
rough patch in your marriage, facing off with a serious
illness, or trying to decide whether to buy that new house.
Now, with our army of under-employed advice columnists, we
can act on that intelligence–and send you professional
advice targeted at your most private problems. Whether
you’re struggling with personal debt, trying to lose
weight, or starting to suspect that your spouse may be
cheating, the NSA is here to help!”

For more on the NSA’s illegal spying program:

http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying

For this complete post:

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

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* AP Sues Artist for Being Unable to Draw from Memory

The AP has brought a suit against the artist Shepard Fairey
for calling himself a political artist while being unable
to draw a realistic likeness of public figures from memory.

Fairey had previously sued AP to establish his fair use
rights to an AP news photograph he used as the basis for
his iconic “Hope” poster of then-presidential candidate
Barack Obama. AP has now filed counter-suit, claiming
Fairey has no right to produce posters in support of
politicians that he cannot draw without reference.

“Mr Fairey claims he is an artist with the right to comment
on public issues such as the presidential election,” said
AP attorney Skip Stones. “But Mr. Fairey apparently
requires a photo to work from in order to create a lifelike
image of a public figure such as Mr. Obama. Clearly, he has
no business engaging in graphic political commentary of any
kind.”

Mr. Fairey says that he attended the Pasadena College of
the Arts where he did in fact learn to draw from memory,
but his training was limited to Republican politicians then
in office. “I had never seen or heard of Barack Obama
before 2006, so I hadn’t memorized his face yet,” said the
artist.

However, Mr. Stones said Fairey was welcome to license an
image from the AP, so long as he could afford to do so.
“The next time he wants to comment on political events, he
should get permission from the subject of the work first
and request a photo shoot,” said Stones. “If the politician
is somehow not available, Mr. Fairey can ask the AP
politely for permission to work from one of our photos –
along with a sizable licensing fee.”

For more on Shepard Fairey and the AP:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/03/ap-uses-dmca-intimidate-hope-artist

For this complete post:

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

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* Google Offers Free, Ad-Supported Kitchen Appliances

Google today announced a new line of high performance
kitchen appliances, available to US customers for free. The
catch? The announced range, refrigerator, and dishwasher
all include built in web-enabled cameras that monitor the
contents of each device and touch-screen LCD displays that
provide a stream of “relevant” advertisements. “Over the
lifetime of the appliance, we expect the advertising will
more than cover the cost of the product,” said Google’s
manager of advertising products Eileen Over. “Moreover,
because these are all Energy Star certified,” added
Google’s head of green initiatives Charlton Soylent, “this
new offering will move us toward the Obama Administration’s
vision of a greener America.”

When asked about privacy concerns, Ms. Over pointed out
that the cameras only monitor the contents of the
appliances (a camera-enabled range hood to monitor what’s
cooking is reportedly in the works). As a result, no
information about what goes on in the kitchen would be
transmitted to Google. “This is no different than the
cameras we’re putting inside the glove box of your
automobile,” said Ms. Over. “Nothing to worry about.”

For more on Google’s behavioral advertising program:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/03/google-begins-behavioral-targeting-ad-program

For this complete post:

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

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* Amazon Gives in to Author’s Guild — Again

Amazon’s Kindle has once again stoked the ire of the
powerful Author’s Guild with their recent addition of
public domain works to the list of titles now available to
Kindle readers. Lawyers for the Author’s Guild said the
Kindle’s ability to read non-copyrighted works is harming
the ability of living authors to profit from their works.

“If a Kindle owner can choose from the entire library of
human literature, with access to every book ever written,
how will living artists ever get read?” posited Author’s
Guild lawyer John Dewey. “The Kindle’s ability to read
works in the public domain is clearly a threat to living
authors’ ability to make a living from their works.”

Fortunately for living authors and the Author’s Guild,
Amazon quickly backtracked. New versions of the Kindle’s
operating software contain features that prevent works that
are not protected by copyright from being read on the
device.

Earlier this year, Amazon offered licensing fees to authors
whose works can be read by the the Kindle — despite the
fact that no copyright laws were broken by the device’s
text reading functions.

For more on Amazon’s Kindle and the Author’s Guild:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/does-authors-guild-want-sue-you-reading-aloud-your

For this complete post:

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

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* EFF Offers Awards for Large Composite Numbers

Inspired by the attention its Cooperative Computing Awards
has brought to the power of collaboration to solve
difficult mathematics problems, EFF today announced a new
award. EFF will offer three increasing rewards of $6, $8,
and $12 to the persons or team who, working
collaboratively, can discover a world-record composite
number.

Composite numbers are those which are divisible by some
whole number other than themselves and one. Familiar
examples include 8, 100, 525, and 4294967296. Notably, all
even numbers greater than 2 are composite. Composite
numbers have important applications in engineering,
scientific research and even finance, where they are often
used to measure enormously large values with a high degree
of precision. Composite numbers are surprisingly common –
indeed, most numbers are composite — but naming extremely
large composite numbers can become a daunting task.

However, throughout human history, the largest known
composite number has consistently been larger than the
largest known prime number. Indeed, this trend is likely to
continue. The world’s largest known primes have for some
time been Mersenne primes; but to every Mersenne number
2^p-1 where p is a prime, there corresponds a larger
composite number 2^p-1+1.

In 2007, two philosophers competed in an event under the
auspices of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to
see who could name the largest number using only an
ordinary chalkboard. The winning number, found by Prof.
Adam N. Elga, was almost certainly composite.

“Huge composite numbers are all around us, but very few
people have ever even tried to name a number larger than a
googol,” said EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen.
“Hopefully this contest will remedy that and maybe even set
a few records in the process.”

A proof attributed to the Greek mathematician Euclid shows
that there is no largest composite number. Euclid suggests
multiplying all known whole numbers together and then
failing to add one. The result will be divisible by “lots
of stuff,” and hence composite.

EFF’s new awards program was established with funds found
under a couch cushion one day here at the EFF office.
Prospective claimants will — as with EFF’s Cooperative
Computing Awards — need to publish their results in a
peer-reviewed scientific journal, including rigorous proof
that the numbers they are claiming are not prime. The proof
must also show that a claimed composite number is larger
than Prof. Elga’s 2007 record. EFF also reserves the right
to require that claimants explicitly identity at least one
specific divisor of a claimed composite number.

For this complete post:

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

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* Commonwealth of Kentucky Fails to Control Internet

The Commonwealth of Kentucky, rebuffed by a state court in
its unsuccessful attempt to assert control over the
Internet by trying to seize the domain names of
international web sites it doesn’t like, has withdrawn its
lawsuit. This is the latest in a recent series of failed
technology-related initiatives by the Commonwealth,
including:

* An attempt to scuttle the rumored agreement that would
make the catalog of that hippie band “The Beatles”
available for digital purchase on iTunes.

* A proposed requirement that, for the love of God,
teenagers stop using confusing abbreviations and other
shorthand writing styles in their electronic communications
that state officials can’t understand.

* A mandate that only one social networking site can be
“cool” in any calendar given year, and that state officials
be told by January 1st (a) what site that is, and (b) what
they should do with it.

For more on the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the Internet:

http://www.eff.org/cases/commonwealth-kentucky-v-141-internet-domain-names

For this complete post:

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

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* PM Brown Announces the Permanent High Office of Hacking
and Tinkering in the Chancellory of the Exchequer

What with all the hubbub over President Barack Obama’s DVD
box set naff gift to Prime Minister Gordon Brown being
region-coded and locked-out, Her Majesty’s Government has
responded with the announcement of the Permanent High
Office of Hacking and Tinkering in the Chancellory of the
Exchequer (hereby known as PHOHTCE). Brown warned that this
was an urgent matter to be resolved by Thursday, at which
time the G-20 movie night will take place, adding
emphatically “and there’s no need to bish bash bosh about
it.”

The controversy made the papers when it was revealed that
“King Ralph,” one of the classic American films included
in
the set, was not available in a Region 2 coded DVD, since
none of the discs were readable with the UK DVD players
available at 10 Downing Street. To avoid diplomatic
embarrassment as transatlantic relations grew tense over
differences in approach to economic stimulus, the Prime
Minister’s office simply purchased new UK copies of all the
DVDs. Her Majesty the Queen’s office, who had similarly
inquired about the availability of the movie in British
format when she was offered it as a gift from President
George W. Bush in 2004, had subsequently received a VHS
copy complementary from the London offices of the Motion
Picture Association (MPA).

Concerned about criticism over the narrow focus of the new
office, Prime Minister Brown reminded the press corps that
both Afghanistan and Iraq will be implementing
anti-circumvention provisions in their copyright laws in
the coming year as a priority of the United States Trade
Representative for the region. “This is the time for the
new generation to continue the heroic work of Bletchley
Park,” referring to the World War II British codebreakers.

For this complete post:

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

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minilinks

~ YouTube Blocks China in Response to China Blocking
YouTube
According to YouTube general counsel Zahavah Levine, “They
started it!”

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

~ Uninteresting Boston Man Foils Google’s New
“Interest-based Advertising” System
In a slow, lethargic deadpan, man claims to have seen only
one ad, stating “Error! Error! Does not compute!” prior to
a catastrophic computer crash in Mountain View, California.

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

~ ACTA “Laundry List” of Rightsholder Industry Demands Is
Actually a Laundry List
Items on the list include “plaid hipster jacket” and
“enormous brassiere.”

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

~ Wikileaks Leaks All Over Itself
Staying true to its principles, the whistleblowing website
posted a link to a leak of its own sensitive donor
information.

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/02/wikileaks-posts-leaked-list-of-wikileaks-donors.ars

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Announcements

* Changes to EFF’s Privacy Policy

To better serve our clients, customers, supporters, and
benefactors, EFF will from time to time alter our Privacy
Policy. As of April 1, 2009, the following minor changes
have been made:

1) In pages 1-30 of our Privacy Policy, delete “never” and
replace with “within a matter of hours.”

2) For “sole and exclusive right throughout the universe,”
please substitute “multiverse” throughout.

3) Where “session cookie” appears, delete and replace with
“lloigor.” “Deleted” should be replaced with “clumsily
re-animated.”

4) In section 14.4, “shared with third-parties” should read
“sacrificed to Yog-Sothoth, Key and Guardian of the Gate.”
“From time to time” is a typo and should read “For all ye
time immemorial.”

5) Our Website no longer supports the Konqueror 3 browser.

Please update your own local copies, and destroy any
previous versions you may have made. If you have forwarded
our Privacy Policy and Website Terms of Service to other
individuals, please contact them and ask them to destroy
their outstanding versions. If they ask why, have them
killed. Our Privacy Policy and Website Terms of Service are
(c) 1989-2009 the Electronic Frontier Foundation AG
(Offshore Holdings), Principality of Liechtenstein.

For this complete post:

http://www.eff.org/pages/04/01

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* Administrivia and EULA

EFFector is published by:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation

http://www.eff.org/about

Editor:
Kodi, EFF Mascot
kodi@eff.org

Membership & donation queries:
membership@eff.org

General EFF, legal, policy, or online resources queries:
information@eff.org

End User License Agreement (EULA):

We’ve given up trying to explain the rules to you. Our team
of lawyers labors over every turn of phrase, deliberating
over each carefully chosen “if,” “and,” and “therefore” in
our EULA. But do you care? Do you even bother to read our
lovingly written fine, fine print? No, you don’t.

Well, we’re tired of it. It seems no matter how clear we
try to be with our long sentences and even longer
paragraphs in perfect legalese, you — the public –
continue to ignore the small type and do whatever you damn
well please.

So if, after reading EULAs for most of your adult life, you
still believe you have the right to simply cut and paste
this text and use it for whatever devious purpose you can
come up with, then just go ahead. Really. GO RIGHT AHEAD!
We won’t stop you. That’s our new EULA. Just do it!

Were throwing in the towel. Because no matter how many
times we tell you that you CAN’T COPY, that it is ILLEGAL
to do so, that our ownership over the content covers the
work, secondary works, derivative works and all
interpretations of the work, throughout the universe in
perpetuity in any and all media, now known or hereafter
developed, you continue to trample on our IP rights.

So just go ahead, copy this EFFector and paste the bits you
want into your email browser or your blog or your Facebook
profile or what have you and share with your friends. Go
ahead, take our ideas and run with them. Make them your
own. See if we care.

Back issues of EFFector are available at:

http://www.eff.org/effector/

The Pew Internet & American Life Project (PIP), a very important source on data about Americans’ Internet uses, has completely revamped its Web site. Among other things, it is now even easier to download their data than before. These are made available in SPSS format only. I use StatTransfer in such cases (for conversion to Stata), any other tools that have worked well for folks?

They also have a handy tool for searching their data base of questions. We’ve been working on something similar in my lab for a bunch of Internet-related surveys although stopped the process due to lack of funding. Pew was smart to work with the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at UCONN on this since they have so much experience in this domain. Perhaps worthy of note is the fact that a search on the same term on the Roper and the PIP sites does not yield the same results. While some Pew data seem to be available through the Roper site, these seem to originate from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and not from PIP. That’s something to keep in mind when looking for Internet-related data.

For those not interested in accessing the raw data directly, PIP’s full reports continue to be easily available by topic on the site as are some stand-alone figures from these. Overall, the amount of material PIP is making easily available is a wonderful resource so many thanks to the great folks there!

* The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a resource on Surveillance Self-Defense.

* The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (my host for the year) has released a 2007 report on circumvention tools.

Both are carefully-written, interesting and helpful documents worth a look.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society just launched Herdict Web, “a tool that employs the distributed power of the Internet community to provide insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility.”

Depending on where you access the Internet, the frequency with which you run into inaccessible Web sites varies. The OpenNet Initiative has been documenting cases of Internet filtering for years (see resulting Access Denied book). Herdict Web’s ultimate goal is similar, but the methodological approach is different: it relies on users’ reports from across the world to display a real-time picture of user experiences with Web site accessibility. Read more about it.

And be sure to join the herd! (Rest assured that everyone on the project realizes that a group of sheep tends to be referred to as a flock.) Congrats to Jonathan Zittrain and the entire Herdict Team on a great site and service!

Steve’s blog points us to Show Us the Data whose purpose is to “identify the 10 Most Wanted Government Documents”, that is, “unclassified documents or data that .. exist–on paper or in government computers and databases–that would be of value to the public if posted and regularly updated on an agency’s Web site.” Check out Steve’s blog and that voting site for more on truly freeing up free government documents.

Amazon is quoting me a higher price than it’s quoting my friend, on the same product. I knew this was theoretically possible, of course, but I didn’t realize online stores engaged in these practices much these days. After all, is it really worth annoying customers when they find out? After a bit of experimentation, it seems to me that what’s going on here is that those with a Prime membership are being quoted a higher price. Ouch. So the thanks I get for paying for the Prime membership and shopping at Amazon a lot is higher prices. No thank you.

I was about to buy a Canon Digital Rebel XSi and some lenses (in sum, a $1K+ purchase) when I saw the link to an 8GB storage unit (the Transcend 8 GB SDHC Class 6 Flash Memory Card TS8GSDHC6) and decided to check it out given the size of photos I may be taking with a 12 MP camera. I clicked on the link and saw that the card cost $10 plus change (I have no screenshot of this as I didn’t realize I’d want one later). I then clicked on Add to Shopping Cart at which point I realized that I was logged on under a friend’s account who’d been using my computer earlier in the day. I logged out and logged back in using my own account. I went back to the same product’s page and noticed that the unit was now $17.13. (See screenshot here.) That’s annoying, after all, who likes to be charged 70% more than others? I logged out and did a search for the product without being signed on at all. Now the product came out costing $14.14 (screenshot). I logged back on using my own account to see what I would get now, and back I was at $17.13.

I have another Amazon account for other purposes so I decided to see how that would be treated. That account was quoted $14.14. The account I had tried first is the one I use the most. It is a Prime account. Prime means that for a payment of $79 a year, I get unlimited 2-day shipping on items that are eligible for it (which includes quite a few items). It also means that I have an incentive to shop at Amazon, because 2-day shipping is included on many things so I don’t have to worry about additional shipping costs.

As I was looking around the site for an explanation of the different prices – I found none, shocking, I know – I learned that it was possible to share my Prime membership with other members of my household. I decided to share the membership with my other account to test whether it was the Prime membership that was giving me the higher price quote. Indeed. Once I signed up for Prime with my second account, that account was now also being quoted $17.13 for the item.

When I initially sat down to use Amazon, I was going to spend well over $1,000. I walked away spending nothing. Additionally, I have no intention of continuing my Prime membership (I disabled the auto-renewal for it immediately), unless I get some explanation and the chance to buy items at prices others are being offered them. I sent Customer Service three notes already, but nothing helpful has come back so far. (The first response was outright offensive as the person either didn’t read or completely misunderstood the point of my email and sent back a canned response having nothing to do with my situation. I resent the query with what I hoped was a clearer explanation of the situation and still didn’t get anything addressing the question. I am waiting for the third response, but not holding my breath. Really, what I’m waiting for is for someone to tweak my account so I’m being charged what others are.) Of course, by not renewing my Prime membership, I’ll have much less incentive to shop at Amazon period (after this experience, it certainly won’t be the first place I go to look for things anyway). I guess most Prime members probably don’t realize this is going on or they don’t care about the differential so perhaps this practice doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. But it matters to me, more on principle than based on the $3 differential (although 21% could amount to a lot depending on the price) .

I’m curious to know what price quote others get on that product when they log on. If you’re a Prime member, do you see $17.13? If not, do you get $14.14 or less? Do you have other examples of such differentiated pricing at Amazon based on user account?

By the way, to read about the practices going on here, I recommend Joe Turow’s book on Breaking Up America. (No, of course that’s not a link to an Amazon page, I don’t plan on supplying those here anymore, not unless this gets cleared up.)